Internalisation and attachment in infant mental health: psychoanalytic observations of vulnerable infants

One challenge for Infant mental health research is to bring the clinician’s sensitivity together with the rigour that we have come to associate with Attachment Theory. To what extent, for example, can research instruments generate findings directly applicable to working with vulnerable parents and babies? One difficulty is that research and clinical work, such as attachment research and psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy, use different theoretical frameworks. Another is that we know more about what correlates with infant attachment than about how parents’ behaviour, interactional style and/or attachment status achieve effects.
In this paper I aim to make a bridge between the kinds of theoretical concepts and assumptions that one might work with in psychoanalytically informed parent infant psychotherapy with attachment research by focusing on what may be internalised from early interaction, and how it may be implicated in attachment relationships established by 12 months. A central assumption is that attachment styles reflect different ways of involving the primary object in both regulating and forming compromises around anxiety, on the one hand, and in satisfying needs for companionship on the other.
Investigating these processes requires a methodology that links infant mental-emotional development to processes relevant in the clinical situation. One such method is psychoanalytic infant observation. Here I aim to illustrate something of its scope for investigating the subtleties of emotional regulation and the vicissitudes of intimacy between infants and parents.